Is it possible to frugal-install AntiX to a Windows partition

[Member bci]

I’m trying to perform a frugal install of AntiX from a live USB to a Windows partition, then I get a message along the lines of,
“trying to create <linuxy directory>; can’t do this, it’s a read-only partition.” I did a little Web search on frugal installs, and the impression I get is that
you have to first create a separate partition for the frugal install (unless it’s already a Linux partition, in which case the frugal install lives happily in some
subdirectory in your filesystem.) It’s understandable that an ntfs filesystem wouldn’t accept the creation of said directory; but I think it’s ideal to actually have the frugal partition right inside the Windows filesystem, so as to not bother with extra partitions and such (I don’t mind using a USB stick to initiate boot, but I do want to somehow keep the install minimalist in this regard. If I have to create a partition, then that already limits the size of my frugal installs!)

• This topic was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by bci.

[Forum Admin rokytnji]

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Never tried it with antiX. I used to run Puppy in Windows XP frugally. Years ago.

http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/faqs/uefi-lick.html

You are welcome to try though.

Sometimes I drive a crooked road to get my mind straight.
Not all who Wander are Lost.
I'm not outa place. I'm from outer space.

Linux Registered User # 475019
How to Search for AntiX solutions to your problems

[Member ModdIt]

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Hi,
so as to not bother with extra partitions and such

as I do not know the why, just point out having everything in one place is devastating when things go wrong.
If you keep important data separated and the drive is not really dead you can recover easily.
That also applies to using a separate home partition on normal Linux installations, if the base system gets broken
which mostly happens when we do silly things getting back up and running without data loss is a matter of minutes,
even if you have not got a backup of the last weeks work..

[Member Xecure]

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If you search the forum for frugal+ntfs you should see a few cases.

Girafenaine wrote:

I am running persistence for root and home.

This frugal install is on a windows laptop, on a ntfs partition.

Take a look at that thread. Frugal works on ntfs (and they didn’t report it to be complicated to install), but they were trying to figure out how to remaster with a new kernel. I think you can learn a bit more there.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member bci]

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Thanks everybody for the awesome replies. Moddit brings up a good point, actually – having a separate partition for frugal installs would be a good idea anyway, just allot a significant amount of space to fit several installs (assuming each install needs up to 15GB, then if you wanted three, then allot 45GB).

I recently got a laptop with almost a terabyte of hard-disk storage, so that surely won’t be an issue 🙂

Some other thoughts on how persistence works:

I’m under the impression that, when you use Firefox, it does a lot of writes to your home directory. In fact, I once had a Linux installation of mine infected with
malware only because somebody had managed to plant the malware somewhere within my home directory via Firefox – they can’t easily write to my root directory, so they logically went for the low-hanging fruit and took advantage of Firefox’s write-permissions in my home directory.

When I use USB persistence, I nowadays almost always do ‘persist-root’ with the ‘toram’ boot parameter – both the rootfs and linuxfs are in RAM, and I can remove my USB stick, and then only insert it when I need to remaster or otherwise persist-save. However, if I want a separate home persistence file (homefs), since that doesn’t get loaded into RAM, I have to leave the stick in if I want to use that.

Because of how Firefox treats your home directory, I’m still not sure if I’m convinced that read-writes from home are few in number, and maybe a dynamic peristence option for homefs could be of benefit in this case?

I’m still pretty new at using AntiX USB persistence features, and am (of course) looking into how frugal installs can benefit me. I still haven’t decided what the best persistence configuration is for me (and I’m by no means an expert on these topics), but I just wanted to share those thoughts.

– Brandon

[Member ModdIt]

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Hi Brandon
Allowing a lot of writes to a usb stick is a bad idea, it seriously shortens its life. read all you like
write as little as possible.

on Firefox, depending on your hardware, especially RAM, you can limit temp or other writes from fox.
from 2 GB Ram onward it is possible to forbid disk caching. With 2 Gig, firefox cleansed, ads blocked
as far as possible you can, depending on usage, meaning other programmes open at same time as fox, open
several Tabs. With 4 Gb you should not hit limitations, unless you do crazier things than the Moddit kids
who have a ton of tabs open most times..

Sanitizing Fox correctly will also leave you way less easy to attack. In a standard download many things
can be done remotely including changing your settings. In our experience, not just by Mozilla. Pls take a
read in the Browser thread. Some hints there, also in previous posts in the forum. Some very useful info
on GHacks. The user.js template pointed to from there leaves most sites working, you can and might wish to
do more.

Palemoon is lighter and offers more privacy than fox out of the box.
Badwolf is lighter still, lightning fast and works fine on many sites. Just copy and paste urls from a list.
Less comfortable but, nobody can steal your bookmarks through that browser with ease. it is way more powerful
than it appears. i use it a lot.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by ModdIt.

[Anonymous]

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Allowing a lot of writes to a usb stick is a bad idea, it seriously shortens its life.

I have the same outlook, prefer to avoid subjecting pendrive flash media to excessive write operations…

…but we should acknowledge that several (in fact, it’s fair to say “many” at this point) many people posting to this forum, the MX Linux forum, and elsewhere claim that they do freely permit writes, yet they have not often experienced instances of media failure.

[Anonymous]

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Firefox, it does a lot of writes to your home directory

Toward minimizing ff writes operations,
you can visit “about:config” and specify browser.cache.disk.enable=false

If you have other drives attached, instead of disabling you might specify a custom location (not on SSD or flash drive)
by creating a mountpoint, or using a symlink…
browser.cache.disk.parent_directory = /path/of/your/choice

SEPARATE FROM ABOVE, firefox frequently writes session and history to disk.
The value for prefkey browser.sessionstore.interval = is given in milliseconds.
IIRC, the default is 15000 (15 seconds); I’ve set mine to 120000 (2 minutes)
If my firefox crashes, upon attempting session restore, I’m fine with it restoring the “tabs open as of 2 minutes ago”

Because of how Firefox treats your home directory, I’m still not sure if I’m convinced that read-writes from home are few in number, and maybe a dynamic peristence option for homefs could be of benefit in this case?

homefs write operations will never be dynamic, always “static” (committed to disk imediately)
I agree that dynamic peristence (root_persist) is beneficial, re dealing with incessant ff writes.

[Anonymous]

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a followup (for clarification, instead of risking an attempt to “Edit” my previous post)

root_persist
The saves do encompass, do preserve, changes to files pathed under /home

The merits in choosing immediate writes, to a separate “static homefs”:
* useful, or outright necessary, if one’s system has a loose power cord or the local electrical system is prone to frequent interruptions

* useful for portability ~~ you gain ability to copy JUST homefs content to another O/S (or share a single homefs between multiple frugal instances, or…)

At the boot menu, we do have an opportunity to change the type of persistence to be used for THIS session, or we can choose to forgo use of persistence during a given session. I’m pointing out that although we CAN change the type, the result can be confusing. During a session in which homefs is active, not only are changes to files pathed under /home written there, any previously-stored-to-homefs files will overshadow, will mask, any same-named files present within the rootfs. Similarly, any (copies of, changed versions of) files saved to homefs will be unknown (absent) during sessions in which you’ve elected to use root_persist.

[Member Girafenaine]

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Hello,

I can confirm I use everyday a frugal install on an NTFS partition which boots on Windows. I put my “antiX key” in, and it boots on antiX… I like this way because I didn’t have to modify the laptop which is my work laptop. No strange partition or anything else, only a few folders on the root of the main partition, that do not draw attention… And if someone else boot this laptop, it will boot normally on Windows. Kind of pirate in my own organization, just to avoid Windows 🙂 (and to add some fun too).

And since yesterday I even have two frugal install, one for antiX 19, and another for antiX 21 runit beta2. Each one need its own live USB key to be booted (which is not very practical; it would be better to be able to boot several frugal install with only one USB key… but at the moment one USB has got only one kernel and initrd, and is able to boot only a frugal OS with the same kernel).

Girafenaine
----
Antix 19 - Fluxbox - Live USB stick and frugal / MX 19 - Fluxbox - Dell XPS 7590

[Member Girafenaine]

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As for your initial issue, eg antiX-live-USB not able to create a directory in your main Windows partition, your need to further investigate why. As I wrote I could do that yesterday in a few minutes, just letting antiX-live-USB with “frugal” boot option to make its work.

Your partition is said to be mounted on read only mode. That could be because there is an error when trying to read some infos about it. You could try the command “fsck /dev/sdaX” (X being the number of your Windows partition, you can check it with command “lsblk” which displays all your partition). fsck can detect an issue on the partition, and is able to clean some kind of errors (for example after a bad shut down).

One specific issue is due to Windows : it does not really shut down, it hibernates (or parts of the system hibernate, at least). In order to have full read access to your windows partition when booting from a live-USB, you first need to boot on Windows and uncheck some default options that prevent Windows to really shut down. I don’t remember more precisely which options (under “shut down” category probably), but you can find it out easily by some search on the web. I guess you should start with this point, before looking for a partition error with fsck.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by Girafenaine.

Girafenaine
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Antix 19 - Fluxbox - Live USB stick and frugal / MX 19 - Fluxbox - Dell XPS 7590

[Member Girafenaine]

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About windows partition not being mounted in read/write mode :

https://askubuntu.com/questions/145902/unable-to-mount-windows-ntfs-filesystem-due-to-hibernation

Pay attention to the “Windows fast startup” thing if you use Windows 8 or 10, that’s the point I had in mind and you just need to change this option (power settings -> change settings -> turn off fast startup).

Girafenaine
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Antix 19 - Fluxbox - Live USB stick and frugal / MX 19 - Fluxbox - Dell XPS 7590

[Member Girafenaine]

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I just realized that this thread was in october but… one year ago… probably the original poster has gone its own path.

Hopefully it will help future users 🙂

Girafenaine
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Antix 19 - Fluxbox - Live USB stick and frugal / MX 19 - Fluxbox - Dell XPS 7590

[Member bci]

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Hey all,

It looks like I’m “necrobumping” my own post, but I wanted to share that I’ve more or less succeeded in what I had set out to do initially:
I’ve gone frugal on a separate partition on an otherwise Windows machine. I had been experiencing difficulties:

1. The hard drive was encrypted (some kind of Windows machine factory default), so I had to remove the encryption via a menu selection which let me do it,
   even though the de-encryption itself was somewhat lengthy. This is how I could even make the separate partition to begin with.
2. I almost wasn’t able to boot from a USB stick, since there are a few subtle BIOS settings that have to be toggled before you may do so, one of them being the “Windows fast startup” setting that @girafenaine mentions, which has to be disabled.

I know at first I said I wanted to keep things in the Windows partition, but in the end I was OK with creating a separate antiX-Frugal partition.

—

Here’s some inxi, as well as a screenshot. As you can see, it’s a bit more of a recent machine:

System:
Host: antix1 Kernel: 4.9.0-326-antix.1-amd64-smp arch: x86_64 bits: 64
Desktop: IceWM v: 3.3.3 Distro: antiX-22_x64-core Grup Yorum 19 October 2022
Machine:
Type: Laptop System: LENOVO product: 81DE v: Lenovo ideapad 330-15IKB
serial: <superuser required>
Mobo: LENOVO model: LNVNB161216 v: SDK0J40700 WIN
serial: <superuser required> UEFI-[Legacy]: LENOVO v: 8TCN61WW
date: 05/19/2021
Battery:
ID-1: BAT0 charge: 24.9 Wh (98.8%) condition: 25.2/30.6 Wh (82.3%)
CPU:
Info: dual core Intel Core i3-8130U [MT MCP] speed (MHz): avg: 800
min/max: 400/3400
Graphics:
Device-1: Intel UHD Graphics 620 driver: i915 v: kernel
Device-2: IMC Networks EasyCamera type: USB driver: uvcvideo
Display: server: X.Org v: 1.20.11 driver: X: loaded: modesetting
unloaded: fbdev,vesa dri: swrast gpu: i915 resolution: 1366×768~60Hz
API: OpenGL Message: Unable to show GL data. Required tool glxinfo
missing.
Network:
Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
driver: r8169
Device-2: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter
driver: ath10k_pci
Drives:
Local Storage: total: 946.37 GiB used: 14.51 GiB (1.5%)
Info:
Processes: 164 Uptime: 24m Memory: 7.77 GiB used: 1.87 GiB (24.1%)
Shell: emacs inxi: 3.3.25

For the heck of it, I’ll throw in fstab since we’re talking about partitions:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information
#
# Created by make-fstab on Tue Apr 25 23:59:59 EDT 2023

# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump/pass>

# Added by make-fstab swap-file
/live/boot-dev/swap-file none swap defaults 0 0
# Added by make-fstab /dev/sda1 label=SYSTEM_DRV
UUID=8EB4-1F21 /media/SYSTEM_DRV vfat noauto,uid=1000,gid=users,dmask=002,fmask=113,users 0 0
# Added by make-fstab /dev/sda3 label=Windows
UUID=F096B73696B6FBE2 /media/Windows ntfs-3g noauto,noexec,uid=1000,gid=users,dmask=002,fmask=113,users 0 0
# Added by make-fstab /dev/sda4 label=WINRE_DRV
UUID=D8EEB836EEB80EAE /media/WINRE_DRV ntfs-3g noauto,noexec,uid=1000,gid=users,dmask=002,fmask=113,users 0 0
# Added by make-fstab /dev/sda5 label=antiX-Frugal
UUID=fe6eebc4-0237-405d-ac75-9afeb97fcfd7 /live/boot-dev ext4 noauto,exec 0 0
# Added by make-fstab /dev/sdb2 label=EFI-LIVE
UUID=7249-CF0E /media/EFI-LIVE vfat noauto,uid=1000,gid=users,dmask=002,fmask=113,users 0 0
# Added by make-fstab /dev/sr0
/dev/sr0 /media/sr0 auto noauto,users,exec,ro 0 0

The theme below is the PinkPanther theme from box-look.org, get it here.

• This reply was modified 1 week ago by bci. Reason: Add comment about making a partition; include fstab
• This reply was modified 1 week ago by bci. Reason: Add information about PinkPanther theme

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[Member olsztyn]

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As much time elapsed since discussion preceding this post (about two and half years):
– First: Congrats on your success.
– Could you explain how you ended up booting your Frugal antiX: Are you booting from a Grub entry, from a USB antiX stick, specifying a boot partition (antiX boot parameters) or some other way?

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

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